From Seizures to Success: How Epilepsy Became My Greatest Teacher — Part 2 of 5
By Stacey Chillemi | Award-Winning Podcast Host | 20x Bestselling Author | Founder, Advisor Global Media™
If you are just joining this series — welcome. Part 1 tells the story of the coma I survived at age five and the epilepsy diagnosis that followed. You can read it here: staceychillemi.com/teardrop-that-saved-my-life-epilepsy-stacey-chillemi
There is a moment I have carried with me for decades. Not because it was the worst thing that ever happened to me — though it ranks among them — but because of what it set in motion. What it forced me to become. What it ultimately proved about the relationship between our lowest moments and our greatest purpose.
I was at work. A job I had fought hard to earn at a prominent corporation. And then one ordinary afternoon, without warning, my body did what it sometimes does.
I collapsed on the office floor in a full grand mal seizure.
When I came back to consciousness, I was still on the floor.
A colleague walked past. Looked down at me. Stepped over my body like I was an obstacle in the aisle. And kept walking.
Thirty minutes later I was called into an office and let go.
What That Silence Did to Me
I have thought about that colleague many times over the years. Not with bitterness — though there was plenty of that in the beginning — but with a kind of quiet, searching disbelief. What does it take for a person to look at another human being in their most vulnerable moment and choose to keep walking?
I do not have a satisfying answer to that question.
What I do have is a very clear memory of what it felt like to be on the receiving end of that choice.
It hollowed me out.
Not just losing the job — though that was devastating in its own right. It was the silence. The deliberate, chosen silence of someone who saw me and decided I was not worth stopping for. In that silence I heard every fear I had ever quietly carried about myself confirmed out loud.
You do not belong here. You are a burden. You are invisible.
I want to be honest about what that did to me, because I think honesty is the only thing that makes a story like this worth telling. For a while, I believed those things. Not all at once and not consciously — but somewhere underneath the surface of my daily life, that moment had planted something dark that took years to fully uproot.
The Decision Nobody Witnessed
I went home that day with nothing. No job. No dignity. No roadmap for what came next.
And I sat in the quiet of my house, and I made a decision that nobody witnessed, that I did not announce to anyone, and that I could not have fully articulated at the time.
Nobody will ever make me feel invisible again.
Not because I was consumed by anger — though the anger was real. Not because I wanted revenge. But because I understood, in a way I had never understood before, that the people who have been made to feel most invisible are often the ones with the most important things to say.
I had things to say.
What I Built From That Floor
I started writing. Not with a plan or a platform or any idea it would lead anywhere meaningful. I wrote because writing was the one space where epilepsy had no jurisdiction — the one place where no one could step over me or decide my experience was not worth their time.
And I sent those words out into the world.
What came back changed my life. Thousands of letters and messages from people who recognized themselves in my story. People who had felt the same invisible. People who had asked themselves the same desperate question in the middle of their own dark nights.
One letter stopped me completely. A stranger wrote to tell me that my book had saved their life. That they had been at the very edge. That something in my words had reached them in that darkness and pulled them back.
I read that letter many times. And each time I thought about the colleague who had stepped over me. And I understood — finally and completely — that the worst professional moment of my life had not been sent to break me.
It had been sent to build me into someone whose story could save lives.
What the People Who Step Over You Do Not Know
The people who dismiss you — who overlook you, who step over you without a second thought — have absolutely no idea what they are setting in motion.
They do not know that their indifference is going to light something inside you that burns for decades. They do not know that the moment they make you feel invisible is quite possibly the precise moment you begin becoming impossible to ignore.
Today my podcast reaches 1.3 million listeners. I have written twenty bestselling books. I have appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. I have stood before Congress. I have won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host. I have built Advisor Global Media — a company devoted entirely to helping experts, coaches, authors, and entrepreneurs share their stories with the world.
None of that happens without the floor.
All of it happens because of it.
For the Professional Reading This on Their Own Floor
The people who made you feel small do not get to write your ending.
The wound they gave you — as unfair and undeserved as it was — may be the very thing that connects you most powerfully to the people you are meant to reach. Because the world does not need more voices that have never struggled. It needs voices that have been through something real, that can look at someone in the dark and say — with the full authority of lived experience — I have been there. And there is a way through.
That is your purpose. That is your power.
And nobody — nobody — can step over that.
This is Part 2 of a 5-part series: From Seizures to Success — How Epilepsy Became My Greatest Teacher.
Part 1: staceychillemi.com/teardrop-that-saved-my-life-epilepsy-stacey-chillemi
Part 3: The Shoebox Full of Letters — coming next on the website
Part 4: How Nature Healed What Medicine Couldn’t
Part 5: Why I Built a Platform for 1.3 Million People
If this story resonated with you, I would love to help you share yours. Book a Free Strategy Call at calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link and let us talk about what is possible for you.
Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast reaches 1.3M+ listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.
